Lunch with Bob

I have described the nefarious Bob Harrison, Maintenance Man of Raphael House, on a number of occasions: overalled, bulldog gait, wheezy laugh, unashamed user of the Leatherman he always carries with him, and the unrivaled boyish imp gleam in his eye.

Well, this man took me out to lunch today because, well, he found twenty bucks in a stack of old faxes and decided to make good use of it.

After a casual walk to Brownie's Hardware Store, where we ordered some window shades and picked up some staples, we slipped into Sushi Rock. And you guessed it, we ate sushi to rock music (actually more techno-y, eighties remixes, but eh, close enough). Please...enjoy the pleasure of their website: http://www.sushirocksf.com/

The food was spectacular. I know this because at one point in our conversation, I was inspired to say, "Man, I could eat Japanese food all the time." "All the time?" Bob asks with the impish eyebrow raise. "Ummm, ya I think I could," say I with the sort of 'hey I hadn't really thought about that for real until just this very moment' face.

During this conversation, Bob also recounted a story from his Navy days where a routine "fuel transfer" turned almost catastrophically awry: He's a crewman on a supply ship with the mission of refueling Destroyers and other massive ships that need refueling. It's a pretty standard operation. At such and such a latitude and longitude at such and such a time, the ships meet, travel slowly side by side and connect the gas tanks to the supply ship by cables and hoses. Mission starts as planned. It's night time, a little haze over the water, the ships meet and travel together at twelve knots. No problem. The fuel ship shoots the cables over to the Destroyer, and then wires across the hoses that will carry fuel between ships. Standard procedure. The ships are linked. About ten minutes into the fuel transfer, the fuel tanker's engine dies. In the numbing speed of crisis, the tanker slows to a stop as the Destroyer keeps going at twelve knots. The cables and hoses go guitar string tight. " 'Pop, pop, pop, pop,' is all I remember," says Bob, "and the hoses are shooting out gas, flying around in the air like garden hoses on full blast; the steel cables fly back with so much force that when they hit the side of the ship there were sparks everywhere. It's a miracle no one got hurt. It could of easily blown up the ship."

But with a slight shake of his head and a little sigh that marveled at his fortune, he went back to his sushi.

And the techno music played on...